In the production of wallpaper, textiles, and the like a printing roller is usually employed on which a pattern is printed, frequently in a plurality of adjoining bands on the printing cylinder. Such a cylinder is used for the transfer of dye or ink to the textile or paper being printed.
Such a printing roller is produced by photoengraving a nickel-plated steel cylinder with the desired pattern. Typically a light-sensitive reproducing medium is applied to the cylinder and the pattern is scribed in this cylinder with a light beam controlled by a pattern scanner. The pattern is carried usually on a master cylinder and it is known to scan the master cylinder and scribe on the copy cylinder simultaneously by displacing the scanner and the scriber each axially along the respective cylinder as this cylinder is rotated so that both scanning and scribing follow respective helices.
With such systems it is very difficult to reproduce the pattern a succession of times on the copy cylinder. The best methods for doing this involve complicated electronic installations that store the entire pattern and then allow it to be used again, or involve considerable manual labor for setting the arrangement up. In addition it is also frequently desired to shift each band of the pattern relative to the adjacent band so that an artistically pleasing array is produced.
The known systems, thus, are all relatively complicated. It is therefore only possible to use such systems when large-scale production is envisaged, as production costs for producing the printing cylinder are extremely high.